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Appium vs Perfecto comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Appium
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (8th), Regression Testing Tools (6th)
Perfecto
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Performance Testing Tools (15th), Functional Testing Tools (14th), Mobile App Testing Tools (5th), Test Automation Tools (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Appium and Perfecto aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Appium is designed for Mobile Development Platforms and holds a mindshare of 3.0%, down 5.1% compared to last year.
Perfecto, on the other hand, focuses on Mobile App Testing Tools, holds 5.5% mindshare, up 5.1% since last year.
Mobile Development Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Appium3.0%
OutSystems10.7%
Mendix9.5%
Other76.8%
Mobile Development Platforms
Mobile App Testing Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Perfecto5.5%
Tricentis Tosca26.0%
OpenText Functional Testing16.0%
Other52.5%
Mobile App Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Independent consultant, at OpenText
Efficient mobile testing with intuitive emulation capabilities and a user-friendly interface
Initial setup for Appium (especially for iOS) is not beginner-friendly.Consumes too much of your host machine's resources, potentially slowing down the machine.Appium Inspector often lacks deep insight or crashes with certain app builds. Improve test flakiness by intelligently selecting robust self-healing locators,simplified installers, better documentation, GUI-based config management,smart wait mechanisms and better failure logs.
Roland Castelino - PeerSpot reviewer
QA Lead at BMO Financial
Its reporting allows us to have a clear view regarding what tests have been executed
The most valuable would be their Live Stream analysis, where I can see the live analysis of all the executions on a single device or multiple devices as well as track them. The live analysis and reporting would be the single most valuable feature. We leverage Perfecto’s reporting and analytics a lot. From the CI Dashboard, it is mainly the status, which is the past, failure count, and time consumption, e.g., how much time did an average test or script take? Along with that, it provides the historical view compared to the previous result, e.g., am I a pass or fail? Also, the stack trace is very important. Whenever a pass occurs, we don't look beyond that. However, whenever a failure occurs, the stack trace information that it gives us is pretty critical for us when figuring out where failures lie. It gives a summary for the pass/fail count, total test count, the historical view, time consumption for each test as well as the total tests, and the stack rate of the failure. Perfecto's analytics are very important since we use them on a daily basis. We run our executions daily. After every execution, we pull information from the Perfecto reporting system and share that with our stakeholders. Having this information accurately reported is pretty important for us, so everybody is aware of the current status of the product. That way, we can evaluate the health of the product or environment against that which has been executed. Therefore, it helps make those real-time decisions and highlights the impact to the business. I found Perfecto to be pretty easy to use while executing against cross-platforms. The main reason is because the same script or test automation where we execute on multiple platforms has minimal changes that I need to do. Also, it is easy for me to set up an execution on one platform, then on another platform, either in parallel or one after the other. Parallel opportunities save me time. Once the execution has been completed across these different configurations, I can always check and compare, e.g., what are the differences and consistencies? We utilize Perfecto’s cloud-based lab to test across devices, browsers, and OSs. I use it occasionally for manual testing. Though, there are other team members who use it more frequently than I do. I use it mainly for executing my automated tests. We have the Perfecto lab, cloud devices, and machines. I can program my test to execute against any of those devices, which gives me more confidence in my product. I can compare and see how my product or application functionally behaves across these different devices and from a UI point of view, which helps me a lot. The device lab is extremely important to our testing operations. We rely on having multiple devices up and running all the time. Whenever we kick off an execution, there are multiple reasons why executions may get triggered: * CodeCommit * A scheduled job. * Might be on-demand by any stakeholder. We need the lab to be available, as we need devices up and running for executions to take place. Also, the devices help since they allow us to have parallel execution, and not just wait for a sequential device to become free and available. Therefore, volume is definitely key. It also gives us an opportunity to compare execution across platforms in that space. It is extremely important to you that the lab provides same-day access to new devices since we analyze that data every single day after execution. Perfecto provides their own framework called Quantum Framework. That is one option. The other option is, if I want to have my own framework, I can have a Java-based Maven project, take a Selenium library, AppiumLibrary, and REST Assured library, and utilize the open-source framework. It is easy for us to connect to Perfecto, no matter what framework we use, as long as it has these core libraries in it. I can design and structure it any way that I want. The execution will happen in Perfecto no matter what since they have support for these tools or libraries. It is pretty neat that way. We are not dependent on using just one particular framework to use Perfecto. While there are still some framework limitations, there is the opportunity to use multiple, different open-source frameworks, then pass the execution to Perfecto. We can use most frameworks, then design and craft it any way that we want, then just pass the execution to Perfecto.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution helps with test automation. We focus mostly on Java."
"It has great documentation and excellent community support."
"Appium's wide support of programming languages is valuable."
"We get a list that shows all devices that are connected to the system."
"The way Appium server interacts with mobile apps is fantastic. It provides all the information about the elements inside the app, Android as well as iOS. I can interact with the element quickly, just type some text or get some text values from the element - whether it's a drop-down, or web text, or a native element."
"The library is extensive so the driver interacts with most functions or actions on mobile devices."
"The automation part is extremely helpful in streamlining our processes."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature is automated testing."
"It saves on the cost and effort of having to maintain our own virtual testing environment. Even our onshore team is not in the city that we work in, so that helps a lot. Even if we didn't invest a lot in getting multiple devices, having to share those devices would become a hassle."
"The reporting feature is really tough to find in some of the other products that are competitors. Having your CITB type dashboard, where we can see the test results and see recordings of each test that passed or failed, is probably one of the distinguishing aspects of Perfecto."
"We're working in Agile and we need results ASAP. The fact that the lab provides same-day access to new devices is extremely important to us."
"Their team is really great to work with. They're very flexible, and they always show care. They prioritize our work, our company, and our working relationship. I appreciate the ad hoc sessions that they schedule to provide help with troubleshooting, provide the information that we're looking for, or do a demo of a new feature that they have. They're always willing and very quick to get that scheduled for us. I appreciate that a lot."
"The number one feature, which if we didn't have out-of-the-box would be missed, is the fact that we have video execution. That gives us the ability to view errors or defects in the progression, from beginning to the end of the video."
"I also like the reporting functions. We are constantly downloading these reports and sharing them with our final customers. They help us understand what kind of bugs are happening through the applications. The recording feature is handy because it lets us see a video of the process we run through the pipeline and discover the point at which the automation is breaking."
"We are able to offer a quality product that has been tested fully, which improves our customer satisfaction. That is a good thing. It has also reduced our IT infrastructure cost. We don't have to spend a lot on setting up infrastructure, which becomes redundant or obsolete very soon. It helps in offsetting that cost."
 

Cons

"Configuring the project to be used in Appium is a little bit tedious."
"I rarely use Appium nowadays because I'm now at the managerial level, but the last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow. I tried to debug it, but I still couldn't find the problem, so this is an area for improvement in the solution. Another area for improvement lies with the connector and server. For example, the effort to get into the local machine sometimes causes the emulator to become slow, which then leads to failure in testing, and this is the usual issue I've encountered from Appium. An additional feature I'd like added to Appium in its next release is being able to do automation in iOS without using XPath and the name of the element. In Xcode, you can use previous UI tests for detecting elements, but in Appium, you have to use Xpath and the element name instead of being able to directly put the X-UiPath, which is what you can do in Xcode. In iOS as well, sometimes the element doesn't have a name or a path. Sometimes, there's also no element."
"Image recognition could be improved. We have some images in our mobile applications. It should be able to run from the cloud, so we can automate the catcher."
"Configuration-wise, there is a lot of room for improvement."
"The setup and installation were a problem for us at first."
"The challenging part with Appium is that installation can be a bit tricky. It can be challenging to set up in Android versus iOS environments."
"The tool needs to add a dependency manager."
"The user interface needs improvement because there are issues when setting up environment variables."
"One improvement would be speed of execution. If it is an iOS native app, we have noticed that the speed is a bit slower. Perfecto might need to make some improvements in this area."
"Previously, we used the cradle. Every time the mobile was blocking it, we would have to ask Perfecto to provide another one. That took a lot of time away from us."
"Its performance should be improved. Anything to speed up the user interface would be a great help. We've had a lot of pain with their migration from a product UI that was based on Adobe Flash to the new product that is based on HTML5. Migrations like that seemed to be very painful and not a real smooth process. We're still sort of recovering from that migration from old technology to new, and we haven't got all the functionality ported over that we used to have on the old UI."
"It would be nice if there were some kind of AI to compile a list of available devices. Currently, we have to look at the web interface to see the available devices, but the pipelines can't do it on their own there. We always need to do this manually, so it would be better if this feature were automated."
"It would be ideal if there was a complete integration with other test management tools and other applications like HPLM, Micro Focus, or Microsoft Azure."
"When using devices on the cloud, it lags quite a bit at times. I know that these are real devices that are being projected on our laptop screens and monitors, but if the speed could be improved, that would be good."
"We've had a couple of issues lately with videos not loading or browsers dying after some execution, although that happens very rarely."
"The monitoring features, in particular network traffic monitoring, could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Appium is free and open-source."
"There is no license for this solution because it is open-source."
"This is an open source solution so it does not cost anything for licensing or otherwise."
"As far as I know, Appium is a free solution. It's not for commercial use."
"The pricing of Appium is fine."
"The price is good for people to be able to make a favorable decision for the value."
"The solution is free."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"Perfecto is about 30-40% cheaper than Device Anywhere. That was a big reason why we switched. Perfecto also solves some of the issues that we had with Device Anywhere. We have grown by 100% since we started to use Perfecto, and now we have devices roaming. When we look at the competition, we would still stick with Perfecto."
"I am not sure about its pricing, but from our perspective, licensing has been easy. Anytime I have new users or requests for users that want to get added, it's a very simple process. I just give the architectural owner of the product the name and email address, and they're able to easily add a new user. We don't have any issues in regards to getting licenses, but I don't have any insights into pricing."
"It's definitely on the higher end of prices for this type of service."
"Pricing-wise, it is fine. It is not as expensive as what we used to have in the past from HP, IBM, and others. It is decently priced."
"Pricing is an area where Perfecto can do a little better. When we obtain additional licenses, we enter into negotiations with them."
"Although Perfecto is a good product for us to use, it is a bit expensive. It takes management a bit of work to find the appropriate funding for us to keep Perfecto. I imagine there could be some way to make it more accessible."
"Perfecto's price is excellent compared to other products with similar features. It was the lowest of the three we evaluated. We also established a partnership with Perfecto, so they provide discounts when we sell Perfecto projects and licenses to our customers."
"Perfecto has definitely saved us on the costs and efforts of having to maintain our own virtual test environment. We lost about 20 devices in the past to maintenance and audit. That was a massive loss for us, as a company, because we were giving devices to someone, but don't know whether we would get it back or not. Having those virtual labs, we don't need to worry about these kinds of things. We are easily saving $5,000 to $10,000 a month on device costing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

Do you recommend Appium?
I do recommend Appium. It is an open-source solution and completely free of charge. We use Appium and Appium Studio as our base for any type of mobile automation for testing. It has a great interfa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Appium?
My experience with Appium from a pricing perspective is favorable due to it being open source, making it a cost-effective option.
What needs improvement with Appium?
The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement. Additionally, the wait time functionality could be enhanced as I experienced failures with longer wait times.
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Also Known As

No data available
Perfecto Mobile, Perfecto Web
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Virgin Media, Paychex, Rabobank, R+V, Discover
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